|
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
|
Boston Conservatory Freshman Class Address
By: Karl Paulnack
Updated: 03/20/2009 at 12:28 AM
Boston Conservatory -
Boston Conservatory Freshman Class Address Given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory
"One of my parents' deepest fears, I
suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician,
that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school,
I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a
research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I
would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I
announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, "You're
WASTING your SAT scores." On some level, I think, my parents were not
sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And
they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They
just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that
a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts
and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the
kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing
whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of
entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
The first people to understand how
music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to
fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides
of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships
between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as
the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects.
Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our
hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things
inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical
compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by
French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old
when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by
the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and
imprisoned in a concentration camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic
prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were
three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a
clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players
in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners
and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous
masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about
life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind
waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough
energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to
stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And
yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art;
it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created
art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival,
on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be,
somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without
hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but
they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the
human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of
the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."
On September 12, 2001 I was a resident
of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and
its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at
10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit,
without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and
opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the
keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this
completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened
in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why
am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs
a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New
York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not
play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I
would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got
through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn't
shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we
didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the
mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same
day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people
sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful.
The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms
Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York
Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first
communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the
beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the
airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular,
that very night.
From these two experiences, I have
come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment"
as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a
lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a
plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of
human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives,
one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a
way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our
minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber's
heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know
it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music
which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the
Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it
has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you
cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our
conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a
good therapist does.
I bet that you have never been to a
wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only
a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet
you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at
weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then
there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and
someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is
lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of
the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments
after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around
those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so
that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can
you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the
dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just
the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start
crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the
movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The
Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between
invisible internal objects.
I'll give you one more example, the
story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have
played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have
played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in
Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to
please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I
thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign
heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place
in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend
of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron
Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated
to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during
the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are
going to play rather than providing them with written program notes.
But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we
decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come
out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly
man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to
weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his
70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general
demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I
thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by
that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the
first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the
concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next
piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and
second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland
was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in
the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the
auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he
did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: "During
World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation
where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out,
and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had
engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so
as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend
drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not
thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music
you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though
I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now,
but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was
written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could
handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and
those memories in me?
Remember the Greeks: music is the
study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert
in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play
for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland,
and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him
remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music
matters.
What follows is part of the talk I
will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days
from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with
is this:
"If we were a medical school, and you
were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your
work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM
someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to
have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is
going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is
confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether
they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your
craft.
You're not here to become an
entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you
don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a
product, like selling used Chevies. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot
closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to
become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a
chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to
see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony
with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
|
ANNOUNCEMENTS
June 1, 2010 -
June featured member of the Greater Marietta Music Teachers AssociationMay 10, 2010 - Chuck launches his Piano Studio at Southern Keyboards. Click for info. May 1, 2010 - Chuck releases his latest CD "I Take Requests". Click to Listen
KEY PERFORMANCES
March 13, 2010 - Chuck concert at Southern Keyboards, Marietta, GA 7pm for prospective piano students November 9, 2008 - Chuck inducted as an International Steinway Artist October 12, 2008 - Chuck plays the Georgia State University Jazz Pianists Summit
QUOTES
|
